Transitional Forms: Evolve Adding Free Maps

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The Broken Hill Mine and Broken Hill Foundry maps introduce two totally unique environments: Mining caves below the planet’s surface and a fully industrial setting that has you sprinting down factory corridors.

Maybe you’re running around as one of Evolve’s [official site] big beasties, smashing your friends and shouting RAWWWWWRRRR out of the window to let people know you mean business. Maybe you’re having a great time and can’t wait to stomp around in a mining cave or a factory. But on the off-chance that you’re not already enjoying Evolve, two new maps probably won’t tempt you to join the hunt, eh?

The maps are coming to Xbone first, on March 31st, and will make their way to the Sonybone and PC on April 30th. There are details about the maps over at the official site, including the fact that a monster win on the Mine map will cause the area to become unstable. Earthquakes will tear through the surrounding area, which would be hugely exciting if the following sentence didn’t explain the impact of the quakes: “The resulting earthquakes will flush out birds from the surrounding areas, deceiving the Hunters as to where the Monster is really located.”

That does not seem like the best use of an earthquake in a game about sci-fi monster hunting in hazardous environments!

You can see the two new maps in action, along with the upcoming Observer mode, in the recorded livestream below, or you could read Alec’s thoughts about wot the game gets right, and wot it gets wrong.

That’s called making money from microsoft! Evolve has been a cash grabbing, how-much-profit-can-we-possibly-make object since before it even launched. The company’s reason for making the game wasn’t to make a great game that then makes them boatloads of cash, it was to make a massive yacht of cash and build a game around that objective. Mission accomplished it seems.

If you have a full group you could be playing with, I’d say “yes you absolutely missed something extremely special”. Otherwise, probably not. I love the game, but I can only recommend it to people with dedicated gaming groups.

That question is one the Evolve people have never asked themselves. Because for them, the question is how well did Evolve PRE-sell and how much did we get from Microsoft for various (unsavory) favors. Evolve is an object lesson in pre-monetization – the quality of the product is irrelevant and any actual post-launch sales are an unforseen uncalculated bonus.

I played the game at EGX a couple of times and absolutely loved it. A bunch of us took part in the alpha and the beta and then bought the game. While I’ve not been that fussed about playing it by myself, it’s easily one of the best multiplayer experiences you can have with 3 or 4 friends. I’ve no idea what the PC community is like as I play this on XB1, but I could well imagine it’s way more popular on console. I fully expect Evolve to be in my top 10 games at the the end of the year